Do you see that retro-looking device above? That's a cathode ray tube amusement device, one of the one of the first interactive video games ever made. You can tell by the circular green display that this missile simulator game was inspired by the radar displays of World War II. It was created and patented by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in the late 1940s.

To play, you would sit in front of the CRT monitor and use knobs and buttons to move a cathode ray beam around the screen. Your mission was to shoot down enemy airplanes. The beam appeared as a dot on the screen and a printed screen overlay was used to change the position of these target aircraft. Circuitry made aiming the beam more difficult as you went along and scoring, of course, was done by hand. [Gizmag]